The secure operation of the routing protocol is one of the major challenges to be met for the proliferation of the Mobile Ad hoc Networking (MANET) paradigm. Nevertheless, security enhancements have been proposed mostly for reactive MANET protocols. The proposed here Secure Link State Routing Protocol (SLSP) provides secure proactive topology discovery, which can be multiply beneficial to the network operation. SLSP can be employed as a stand-alone protocol, or fit naturally into a hybrid routing framework, when combined with a reactive protocol. SLSP is robust against individual attackers, it is capable of adjusting its scope between local and network-wide topology discovery, and it is capable of operating in networks of frequently changing topology and membership.
The complexity of the alignment problem stems from the fact that existing methods are considered unstable. Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) addresses this issue by minimizing the KL divergence between the trained policy and the initial supervised fine-tuned policy (SFT) to avoid generating out-of-domain samples for the reward model (RM). Recently, many methods have emerged that shift from online to offline optimization, reformulating the RLHF objective and removing the reward model (DPO, IPO, KTO). Despite eliminating the reward model and the challenges it posed, these algorithms are still constrained in terms of closeness of the trained policy to the SFT one. In our paper, we argue that this implicit limitation in the offline optimization methods leads to suboptimal results. To address this issue, we propose a class of new methods called Trust Region (TR-DPO, TR-IPO, TR-KTO), which update the reference policy during training. With this straightforward update approach, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the new paradigm of language model alignment against the classical one on the Anthropic-HH and Reddit TL;DR datasets. Most notably, when automatically comparing TR methods and baselines side by side using pretrained Pythia 6.9B models on the Reddit TL;DR task, the difference in win rates reaches 8.4% for DPO, 14.3% for IPO, and 15% for KTO. Finally, by assessing model response ratings grounded on criteria such as coherence, correctness, helpfulness, and harmlessness, we demonstrate that our proposed methods significantly outperform existing techniques.
We introduce an extractive summarization system for meetings that leverages discourse structure to better identify salient information from complex multi-party discussions. Using discourse graphs to represent semantic relations between the contents of utterances in a meeting, we train a GNN-based node classification model to select the most important utterances, which are then combined to create an extractive summary. Experimental results on AMI and ICSI demonstrate that our approach surpasses existing text-based and graph-based extractive summarization systems, as measured by both classification and summarization metrics. Additionally, we conduct ablation studies on discourse structure and relation type to provide insights for future NLP applications leveraging discourse analysis theory.
Automatic weeding technologies have attained a lot of attention lately, because of the harms and challenges weeds are causing for livestock farming, in addition to that weeds reduce yields. We are targeting automatic and mechanical Rumex weeding in open pasture fields using light weight mobile field robot technologies. We describe a mobile weeding robot with GNSS navigation, 3D computer vision for weed detection, and a robot arm with a mechanical weeding tool. Our main contribution is showing the feasibility of light weight robot, sensor, and tool technologies in mechanical removal of weed seedlings.
This work studies fundamental limits for recovering the underlying correspondence among multiple correlated random graphs. We identify a necessary condition for any algorithm to correctly match all nodes across all graphs, and propose two algorithms for which the same condition is also sufficient. The first algorithm employs global information to simultaneously match all the graphs, whereas the second algorithm first partially matches the graphs pairwise and then combines the partial matchings by transitivity. Both algorithms work down to the information theoretic threshold. Our analysis reveals a scenario where exact matching between two graphs alone is impossible, but leveraging more than two graphs allows exact matching among all the graphs. Along the way, we derive independent results about the k-core of Erdos-Renyi graphs.
Obfuscation stands as a promising solution for safeguarding hardware intellectual property (IP) against a spectrum of threats including reverse engineering, IP piracy, and tampering. In this paper, we introduce Obfus-chat, a novel framework leveraging Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) models to automate the obfuscation process. The proposed framework accepts hardware design netlists and key sizes as inputs, and autonomously generates obfuscated code tailored to enhance security. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we employ the Trust-Hub Obfuscation Benchmark for comparative analysis. We employed SAT attacks to assess the security of the design, along with functional verification procedures to ensure that the obfuscated design remains consistent with the original. Our results demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of the proposed framework in fortifying hardware IP against potential threats, thus providing a valuable contribution to the field of hardware security.
Amid the increasing interest in the deployment of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs), the Virtual Power Plant (VPP) has emerged as a pivotal tool for aggregating diverse DERs and facilitating their participation in wholesale energy markets. These VPP deployments have been fueled by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's Order 2222, which makes DERs and VPPs competitive across market segments. However, the diversity and decentralized nature of DERs present significant challenges to the scalable coordination of VPP assets. To address efficiency and speed bottlenecks, this paper presents a novel machine learning-assisted distributed optimization to coordinate VPP assets. Our method, named LOOP-MAC(Learning to Optimize the Optimization Process for Multi-agent Coordination), adopts a multi-agent coordination perspective where each VPP agent manages multiple DERs and utilizes neural network approximators to expedite the solution search. The LOOP-MAC method employs a gauge map to guarantee strict compliance with local constraints, effectively reducing the need for additional post-processing steps. Our results highlight the advantages of LOOP-MAC, showcasing accelerated solution times per iteration and significantly reduced convergence times. The LOOP-MAC method outperforms conventional centralized and distributed optimization methods in optimization tasks that require repetitive and sequential execution.
There is anecdotal evidence that attackers use reconnaissance to learn the capacity of their victims before DDoS attacks to maximize their impact. The first step to mitigate capacity reconnaissance attacks is to understand their feasibility. However, the feasibility of capacity reconnaissance in network functions (NFs) (e.g., firewalls, NATs) is unknown. To this end, we formulate the problem of network function capacity reconnaissance (NFCR) and explore the feasibility of inferring the processing capacity of an NF while avoiding detection. We identify key factors that make NFCR challenging and analyze how these factors affect accuracy (measured as a divergence from ground truth) and stealthiness (measured in packets sent). We propose a flexible tool, NFTY, that performs NFCR and we evaluate two practical NFTY configurations to showcase the stealthiness vs. accuracy tradeoffs. We evaluate these strategies in controlled, Internet and/or cloud settings with commercial NFs. NFTY can accurately estimate the capacity of different NF deployments within 10% error in the controlled experiments and the Internet, and within 7% error for a commercial NF deployed in the cloud (AWS). Moreover, NFTY outperforms link-bandwidth estimation baselines by up to 30x.
Anomaly detection and localization without any manual annotations and prior knowledge is a challenging task under the setting of unsupervised learning. The existing works achieve excellent performance in the anomaly detection, but with complex networks or cumbersome pipelines. To address this issue, this paper explores a simple but effective architecture in the anomaly detection. It consists of a well pre-trained encoder to extract hierarchical feature representations and a decoder to reconstruct these intermediate features from the encoder. In particular, it does not require any data augmentations and anomalous images for training. The anomalies can be detected when the decoder fails to reconstruct features well, and then errors of hierarchical feature reconstruction are aggregated into an anomaly map to achieve anomaly localization. The difference comparison between those features of encoder and decode lead to more accurate and robust localization results than the comparison in single feature or pixel-by-pixel comparison in the conventional works. Experiment results show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, CIFAR-10, and MVTec Anomaly Detection datasets on both anomaly detection and localization.
Object detection techniques for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) rely on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), which are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Nonetheless, adversarial patches generated by existing algorithms in the UAV domain pay very little attention to the naturalness of adversarial patches. Moreover, imposing constraints directly on adversarial patches makes it difficult to generate patches that appear natural to the human eye while ensuring a high attack success rate. We notice that patches are natural looking when their overall color is consistent with the environment. Therefore, we propose a new method named Environmental Matching Attack(EMA) to address the issue of optimizing the adversarial patch under the constraints of color. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to consider natural patches in the domain of UAVs. The EMA method exploits strong prior knowledge of a pretrained stable diffusion to guide the optimization direction of the adversarial patch, where the text guidance can restrict the color of the patch. To better match the environment, the contrast and brightness of the patch are appropriately adjusted. Instead of optimizing the adversarial patch itself, we optimize an adversarial perturbation patch which initializes to zero so that the model can better trade off attacking performance and naturalness. Experiments conducted on the DroneVehicle and Carpk datasets have shown that our work can reach nearly the same attack performance in the digital attack(no greater than 2 in mAP$\%$), surpass the baseline method in the physical specific scenarios, and exhibit a significant advantage in terms of naturalness in visualization and color difference with the environment.
We study the problem of textual relation embedding with distant supervision. To combat the wrong labeling problem of distant supervision, we propose to embed textual relations with global statistics of relations, i.e., the co-occurrence statistics of textual and knowledge base relations collected from the entire corpus. This approach turns out to be more robust to the training noise introduced by distant supervision. On a popular relation extraction dataset, we show that the learned textual relation embedding can be used to augment existing relation extraction models and significantly improve their performance. Most remarkably, for the top 1,000 relational facts discovered by the best existing model, the precision can be improved from 83.9% to 89.3%.